I remember a kind older couple who loved my parents, John and Nome Mackaleash. They were probably in their 60s and often stopped by our home while traveling back from Canada, where they sold clothing.

My parents seemed to attract all kinds of interesting people who eventually found their way to our house. My mom would feed them, welcome them in, and make everyone feel loved. Looking back, that may have been one of the greatest gifts she gave us.

Money was tight in our family. My dad was a schoolteacher, my mom didn’t work outside the home, and there were a lot of children to provide for. My parents taught us that it was good to take some responsibility for buying our own clothes. We understood there simply wasn’t a lot of extra money.

One day John and Nome came to visit while my sister Rachel was doing a fundraiser. She was selling boxes of M&M candies for one dollar each—which seemed like real money in the 1980s.

We were sitting in the front living room when John learned about Rachel’s fundraiser. He reached into his wallet, pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, and bought the entire case.

To me, that twenty-dollar bill might as well have come from Mars. Nothing about it was within my expectations.

We moved into the kitchen, where Rachel put the case of individual boxes of M&M’s on the counter. Then John did something even more surprising.

He gave each of us our own box.

John didn’t need twenty boxes of M&M’s. He was helping my sister, and then he turned that simple act of generosity into something that made a houseful of children happy.

Fast forward about twenty years, and my own children were doing school fundraisers. Somewhere along the way, I had become almost the opposite of John.

I discouraged my kids from participating. I would say, “I’ll give you a dollar if you don’t do that fundraiser.” I was impatient with people trying to sell me things and didn’t particularly want my children knocking on doors asking people to buy things either.

Then one day I was listening to an audiobook about becoming more generous with money and trusting that generosity has a way of coming back to us.

I decided to try it.

Not long afterward, some Girl Scouts came selling cookies. Instead of finding a reason to say no, I bought two boxes.

My wife was shocked.

She knew that wasn’t the usual me.

Today, when children come to the house selling something, I usually buy from them. When a fundraiser simply asks for cash, I’m okay with that too. Sometimes I even prefer it because more of the money can go directly toward the person or cause I’m trying to support.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that the audiobook may have reminded me about generosity, but John and Nome had demonstrated it to me decades earlier.

At some point, they mysteriously stopped coming by. Life moved on, and I never had the opportunity to tell them what their kindness meant to me. I wish I had.

I doubt John imagined that a boy sitting in that living room would remember his twenty-dollar bill more than forty years later.

As a child, I thought he was buying M&M’s.

Now I understand he was supporting my sister, bringing happiness to a family, and quietly showing us what it looked like to give without hesitation.

I’ve come to believe that generous giving produces a generous harvest. The return isn’t necessarily money. It may come through friendships, opportunities, gratitude, or simply knowing that someone’s day was a little better because we chose to give.

John and Nome never knew they taught me that.

The M&M’s were gone within days. The lesson has lasted a lifetime.

Did you miss last week’s Stories That Made Me? Read Riding Into Joy, the story of how learning to ride a unicycle taught me that sometimes joy begins with simply deciding to try.